I specialise on the languages and literatures of the North Sea region in the earlier Middle Ages, but especially Early English and Old Norse.

I teach the first-year papers Early Medieval Literature and Introduction to English Language, as well as the second-year paper Literature in English 1350-1550. I also teach the Course II paper History of the English Language to c.1800 for the English Faculty.

I studied for my BA (2011) at the University of Leeds and my MA (2012) and Wolfson-funded PhD (2017) at the University of York. I worked as Teaching Fellow in Old and Middle English Literature at University College London (2017-18) before taking up my lectureship at Oxford.

I am a member of TORCH's Early Medieval Britain and Ireland Network.

Publications

Translating the Gospel in Viking Age England: The Evidence from Two Old Norse Loan Translations from Old English

2019

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Journal article

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Anglia: Zeitschrift fuer Englische Philologie

A recent resurgence of interest in Old Norse linguistic borrowings in Old English has greatly expanded our knowledge of the contact situation between these two speech communities in the early medieval period and beyond. How- ever, there are a significant number of words that have been considered borrow- ings in the “other” direction, i. e. from Old English to Old Norse, which have not attracted the same amount of attention in current scholarship. Much of this mate- rial requires reassessment and this paper provides a case study of two parallel compound formations in both languages – OE bærsynnig [mann]/ON bersynðugr [maðr] (‘one who is openly sinful; publican’), and OE healsbōc/ON hálsbók (‘phy- lactery, amulet, lit. ‘neck-book’) – that have traditionally been considered loan translations from Old English to Old Norse with little evidence other than their formation from cognate elements. In the absence of clear-cut linguistic criteria for identifying loan translations between these two closely related languages, this paper draws on a range of literary evidence to argue for a strong likelihood of a relationship between the two compounds. Both words offer important evidence for biblical translation practices, and contribute to our knowledge about the Christianisation of Norse speaking peoples and Anglo-Norse language contact in Viking Age England.